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1 Partners for Progress? Liberals and Radicals in the Long Twentieth Century doug rossinow Today’s conservatives view the Left and liberalism as identical categories , while many on the left see these categories as separate and antagonistic . But neither of these views is adequate. Historically, left-wing radicalism and liberal reform often overlapped in U.S. political life. The inhabitants of this shared political territory formed a left-liberal tradition in U.S. politics, one that had its heyday in the years stretching from the 1880sto the 1940s and that withered in the years after 1950. The kinship between many liberals and those on the left during the era between the 1880s and the 1940s was based in a broadly shared belief in a qualitative vision of progress, according to which American society was undergoing a fundamental transformation. Many who believed in this idea of progress deserve to be called left-liberals. They ranged from the evolutionary socialist Florence Kelley, who in 1888 consigned the “worn and rotten fabric of a perishing society” to history’s dustbin, to the social democrat and philosophical pragmatist John Dewey, who averred in 1902 that he was “scientifically convinced of the transitional character of the existing capitalistic control of industrial affairs and its reflected influences upon political life,” to the Communist Joseph Freeman, who remarked that in the mid-1920s he saw “a deep continuity between the great aspirations of the Renaissance, the French Revolution, the American Revolution, and the modern aspirations of socialism,” to the famous writer Edmund Wilson, who embraced a Marxist version of this perception in the early 1930s when he noted that feudalism had been replaced long ago by “the modern bourgeois-governed world” and added, “now there is only one more step to go.”1 These figures illustrate the political range across which this belief in qualitative progress was dispersed during a long phase of U.S. history. But by the late 1940s, this animating belief in transformative change in American society had become embattled and fatally weakened. As went this belief in progress, so did the vitality of left-liberal politics. After the trauma of McCarthyism in the 1950s and the political conflicts over the Vietnam War in the 1960s, leftists and liberals seemed like strangers. Some concluded that this almost complete alienation was a structural condition of American politics, not realizing that it was a relatively recent phenomenon. Others, ironically, continued to view leftists and liberals as closely allied. In the conversation of today’s right, left and liberal are used as synonyms.2 “It often seems as though the various conservative factions inside the Beltway would rather fight each other than take on the Left,” wrote conservative political commentator Laura Ingraham in a book published in 2007. By “the Left” she meant Democratic Party liberals.3 In his discussion of “the vast leftwing conspiracy against the CIA,” popular radio and television host Sean Hannity included not only the authors of articles published in Mother Jones and the Nation, journals that are at least hospitable to radical left-wing views, but also “left-wing senator Frank Church,” John Kerry, and Daniel Patrick Moynihan, U.S. senators who had little in common save their Democratic affiliation.4 The index for Newt Gingrich’s 2006 book, Winning the Future, contains no entries for “liberal” or “left,” but rather combines them into a single entry for “Left-liberals.”5 Regarding the U.S. war in Iraq that began in 2003,Gingrich, the former Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, wrote, “The Left says that with better diplomacy, we could have France by our side in Iraq,” even though most self-identified leftists criticized the U.S. government for fighting the war, not for fighting it with too few allies. Gingrich framed liberal church-state separationism in terms of “the secular Left’s unending war against God in America’s public life,” and the threat posed to traditional American freedoms by “secular Left-liberal judges.” He expressed concern about “a new and growing pattern among the Left-liberal establishment to view foreign opinion and international organizations as more reliable and more legitimate than American institutions.” The only specific Americans Gingrich identified as representing this “new and growing pattern ” of thought were three current or former U.S. Supreme Court justices (Sandra Day O’Connor, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and Anthony Kennedy).6 Writers such as Ingraham, Hannity, and Gingrich generally described mainstream secular liberal figures and views when using the...

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